Doot v0.1 product specification

Problem

Large inboxes are working archives, but conventional clients make broad analysis difficult and autonomous agents make mailbox changes difficult to trust. Doot should provide emergent analysis without surrendering control.

Product principles

  1. Agent first, user sovereign. Doot investigates proactively and prepares useful actions; the user approves mailbox writes.
  2. The cache is a dataset. SQLite aggregates and FTS5 let the agent inspect all cached mail through bounded tools instead of stuffing messages into prompts.
  3. Generated, not arbitrary. Workspaces compose audited UI primitives and validated intents.
  4. Flows are first-class. Reusable email filters combine a query with archive, move, or delete; users can inspect, edit, preview, discuss, and run them.
  5. Drafts are review-first. Doot may prepare or revise a local draft using explicitly available cache context, but only the user can confirm saving it to IMAP; sending is out of scope.
  6. One activity ledger. Agent conversations, sync jobs, Flow evaluations, schedules, proposals, and mailbox actions are inspectable in History.
  7. Local by default. Mail, credentials, history, and memory remain in the local SQLite database unless the selected model provider receives explicitly delegated context.

v0.1 requirements

  • Multi-account IMAP configuration, connection tests, folder discovery/CRUD, incremental sync, and per-account progress.
  • Paginated cached Inbox with search, account filter, cross-page selection, and a safe reading pane.
  • Persistent agent conversations, manual Organize, selected-message context, tool/reasoning visibility, and generated workspaces.
  • Editable Flows and proposals with a mandatory browser confirmation before mutation.
  • Structured local drafts, persistent draft context in chat, and confirmation-only IMAP Drafts persistence.
  • Filterable History for Agent conversations, sync jobs, Flow runs, schedules, proposals, account changes, folder changes, drafts saved to IMAP, and applied mailbox actions.
  • Persisted once, daily, and weekly schedules for read-only sync and review-only Flow evaluation.
  • Pi-discovered provider OAuth/API-key login and logout, model and reasoning selection, plus sync, privacy, memory, and delegation settings.
  • Local Node, Nix, and Docker developer/runtime paths.

Explicitly out of scope

  • Hosted multi-user service, authentication, teams, and remote administration.
  • SMTP sending, reply delivery, calendar, contacts, and attachment editing.
  • Calendar expressions, remote wakeups, or schedules that run while the local Doot process is stopped.
  • Scheduled or autonomous model runs.
  • Autonomous application of mailbox mutations.
  • Full offline mirror fidelity across every IMAP extension and provider.
  • Mobile-native clients and browser extensions.

Success criteria

  • A run continues while navigating and is recoverable after reopening the workspace.
  • Search and analysis operate over the complete synced cache with pagination.
  • No agent-generated path can directly mutate IMAP.
  • An opened message does not become seen due to Doot.
  • A fresh contributor can run checks through npm, Nix/direnv, or documented Docker workflows.